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"Lumo 2 Dev. Journal"

Posted: 27 March, 2025

Toward the back end of 2022 I posted about my finances, and the need to build up a bit of a buffer via contract work. That was the start of this blog’s long, unintentional, radio silence.

A lot happened since then:

• I did some contract work for Rockstar North. Which I’ll probably never be able to discuss.
• I did some contract work on some web-based games. Which likely aren’t interesting enough to discuss.
• I moved to South Wales.
• I bought a house, which definitely didn’t help the financial situation…
• I signed Lumo 2

When I signed 2umo I fully intended to get back to the blog, and post my usual weekly updates. I had a decent chat with the marketing bod at Numskull games, and we agreed among ourselves that I’d discuss the project, as I do, and post in-development stuff to my socials. They could echo what they wanted to theirs. And then they left the company.

So I got on with the work, waited for the new marketing guru to arrive, and kept on with the radio silence. Things never go as planned, so by the time the new marketing/production person arrived at Numskull, we were several months into development, and we decided to keep our powder dry, and wait for a proper reveal toward the end of the project.

And... Things never go as planned... :D

I slipped the project by three months, just after I delivered first-playable, because I wanted more time to work on content. When I was due to hit Content Complete, the project slipped by another couple of months because we couldn’t get a suitable team to work on the console ports. And with every slip, that big reveal got pushed back. Further and further.

It’s fair to say that the game industry has changed a lot since I signed this project, and not for the better. In hindsight, if we’d known how dire the media landscape would be, we wouldn’t have held out for the big announce – it would have been better for me to have spammed TikTok for 20 months – but we are where we are.

What I did do, was keep a development diary. Not the usual weekly one that I normally post to the blog, but a daily one. Like the old Zzap64 style-jobbies. With screenshots. And when I get a couple of days, I’ll be able to post them here. But I need to do a few things first:

1. Get the thing sub-edited. There’s a lot of it. I’m probably rambling
2. Make some tweaks to my static site generator, so you can move backward and forwards between posts.

Once that’s out of the way, you can expect a (~100 entry) long development diary of the entire project. Start to finish. I’ll also format it as an e-Book, so you view it in PDF-O-Vision on your screen of choice. Cos, some of the screenshots I took are kinda interesting in and off themselves. The project evolved, quite a bit, as I worked on it.

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